A fairy tale in focus : ecstatic focalizations in "A Christmas Carol".

Abstract

English classics have been out of favour with narratology and narrative theorists. The reasons for this may be many. Narrative theory is peculiar for being created and maintained as an international endeavour. The leading researchers, past and present, include a large cohort of Americans (Seymour Chatman, Gerald Prince, David Herman, and Brian Richardson), many Frenchmen, including the “founding fathers” of narratology (Gérard Genette and Tzvetan Todorov), and a considerable number of distinguished Germans (F.K. Stanzel, Monika Fludernik). Other of the non-English speaking nations are also represented: the Dutch (Mieke Bal), the Polish (Michał Głowiński), and the Swiss (Marie-Laure Ryan). In the group we are surprised to find few English narratologists. Done over the past several decades, the research has formed and focused on something like a canon of authors (and works) to whom (and to which) the theorists have paid special attention: Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway among them. Again, none of these are British classics. The result is that the English canonical authors, Charles Dickens included, have not been paid the due tribute of a literary history in the shape of a series of studies written with the help of tools fashioned by narratology. The aim of this article is to use some such tools and in particular to foreground one of the theory’s basic ideas and insights, that of focalization, in an analysis of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843).